Mission Poetry Series: Three Poets in Fall

 The 15th season of the Mission Poetry Series begins with an in-person reading on Saturday, November 4, 2023, at 1 p.m. in partnership with Santa Barbara Public Library.

Three Poets in Fall features award-winning authors Lynne Thompson, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Gustavo Hernandez.  Held at Central Library’s Faulkner Gallery, this reading is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, poets’ books for sale, and the chance to meet and chat with our featured authors. This reading is made possible by the City of Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Poetry Fund, and the Santa Barbara Foundation.

LYNNE THOMPSON was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); and most recently, Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield. Her fourth collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, will be published by BOA Editions in April 2024. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the Boards of The Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June of 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater.

JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI (it / xe / them) is a poet and country musician, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011).  Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry.  Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020).  With its band Juan & the Pines, it released the EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay Honey came out in August 2023.

GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ  is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press) and the chapbooks Form His Arms and Little Fleece (Ghost City Press). His work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review,The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and The Slowdown Podcast. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and lives in Southern California

MPS program curator Emma Trelles is the recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council (2023) and the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara (2021-2023). She is a Poet Laureate Fellow at the Academy of American Poets (2022-2023), one of 22 poets in the United States appointed for their creative and community work. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, and originally from Miami, she is the author of Tropicalia  (U. of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. She coordinates the Writing Center at Santa Barbara City College and is the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, open to Latinx poets in U.S. and published in bilingual editions in the spring by Gunpowder Press.